A Case of Future Vision

I fell asleep at the computer the other day, not the world's most singular event. At some point my dream involved swinging a hammer to pound a bent nail straight, and the moment the hammer struck, BANG! I was jolted awake by a dish accidentally knocked off a table in the kitchen.

Now, there's no way my mind could have forseen the dish hitting the floor, yet my dream state created a brief scenario to account for the bang. It could have been coincidence that the bang of the falling dish just happened to precisely match an auditory construct in my dream, but that seems terribly improbable. I think it's more probable my brain registered the sound of the dish, shaped the dream around it, and would have continued the dream except the sound was so harsh it tripped the conscious mind awake.

Which is to say there was no precognition here, just a complex mind synthesizing separate reactions to one stimulus, in such a manner that my MEMORY of the event recorded it in improper time sequence. And MEMORY is the only residue of the experience; I can only recall the experience via memory. Thus I seem to have a memory of a few seconds of apparent precognition.

I've read about this in an article concerning the search for understanding consciousness: that what we remember of an experience does not always (or may actually NEVER) match the actual temporal sequence of events. The mind is a multiplex processor forming a whole out of separately processed stimuli to create what IT thinks is coherent, but may not accurately represent actual events. That it takes it measurable lengths of time to achieve the synthesis puts it out of synch with real time, and we can be left with memories that don't make sense.

Staff Member

We know, of course, that the brain is ridiculously fast. So I wonder if your brain heard the dish and thought, bang->hammer->nail->bent->straighten->here's a memory of you straightening a bent nail with a hammer.

Drawing the connection of a bang to a hammer seems a simpler connection to me than connecting a bang to a dish falling off a kitchen counter.

So perhaps there is an example of one event leading or coinciding with the other but in the opposite order you think.

Since no one can confirm if you woke up right when the dish hit the floor, or quickly after, there's not much that can be gleened. The brain is a complex organ that's not anything like a computer processor (whether single core or multicore). We don't just have one central relay where all memories are stored. There's various reflex centers (in ganglions) that allow fast reflexes to happen without you having to be conscious of them. That's why CIPA is a very dibilitating disorder, as the person has no pain stimulus for them to have reflexes. The thalamus is the main area in the brain that relays sensory information to the cerebral cortex. It also is associated with states of sleep...and can help you quickly wake up from REM in case of an emergancy. I suspect that it mainly was your thalamus that was randomly supplying your brain with sensory images, and the loud bang of the hammer was formed right after your ear heard the crash. Take note that I'm biased towards medical science...so any notion of ESP happening is furthest from my mind

There's also the issue of how long the crash took. Did the dish hit and bounce, was there actually a singular sound event? However, I think Tony's explanation is best - the sound occurred, then your mind quickly tried to make sense of it while in a dream-like state.

So the secondary question is, how long does it take for you to swing a hammer in a dream? You probably dream of the nerve impulse, then of the impact. All the swing time in real life may be unneeded in a dream.

When we are awake, there is a correlation between events and our awareness of them. This does not have to be the case with dreams. The real key detail is do you have any outside evidence of how long the dish had been on the floor when you woke up?

I, too, have had odd sleep/wake experiences that would be easy to pin arbitrary conclusions on. But the fact is that there is much we do not understand about the brain, and we do know that memory is unreliable.

I have a memory which for many years was the most frightening dream I'd ever had: I was probably 5 years old, or thereabouts. I dreamed that the closet door came open and the ironing board (which was stored in the closet of my bedroom) fell out. Nothing more. But when the noise awakened me, the ironing board was on the floor.

The most likely explanation is that I was awakened by the noise, and I misremembered dreaming the event. But the seeming "prophetic" dream was terrifying. I was certain that the dream had preceded the event.

BTW, I have premonitions frequently. Sometimes that something unpleasant is going to happen, and sometimes that something seriously bad is going to happen. To date, none of my premonitions has ever happened. I wonder if I could claim the JREF million dollar prize based on the theory that being wrong ALL the time is even more unlikely than being right some of the time.

... I wonder if I could claim the JREF million dollar prize based on the theory that being wrong ALL the time is even more unlikely than being right some of the time ...

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Better not apply, Daniel. With Randi's controls in place you'd fail and the cataclysmic event you'd forseen would actually occur. Randi would get to keep his million but wouldn't be able to spend it because the world would have just ended.

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